Are parties passé? Statistics point to rise of closet partisans

Over the past three decades, partisan polarization has increasingly become a fact of life in both Washington and Sacramento. In California, this period has also coincided with substantial growth in the ranks of independent voters.

Until the early 1990s, Democrats and Republicans accounted for almost 90 percent of the California electorate. Today, however, more than one-fifth of voters refuse to affiliate with either of the two major parties, instead choosing to “decline to state” a party preference when registering to vote. Within San Diego, independents represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the electorate and threaten to displace the Republican Party as the city’s second-largest voting bloc.

Among pundits, journalists and political reformers, it has become fashionable to attribute the growing numbers of independents to dissatisfaction with our political system. Moderate voters, the argument goes, are disenchanted with the ideological extremes represented by the major parties, increasingly disgusted with dysfunction in the state legislature, and are abandoning the Democratic and Republican parties in droves to register as independents. Only major reforms that halt and reverse the forces of polarization – such as California’s experiment with the top-two primary – will win them back.

The problem with this argument, however, is that it is clearly inconsistent with available public opinion data. Instead, polling numbers suggest that the growth in “decline to state” registration can best be characterized as the rise of “closet partisans” – voters who refuse to formally affiliate with a political party, but vote no differently than those who do.

When probed, about two-thirds of registered independents admit that they lean toward either the Republican or Democratic Party. In elections, the behavior of these leaners is almost identical to that of actual partisans.

In October 2010, for example, about 80 percent of registered Republicans who had made up their mind planned to vote for Meg Whitman for governor, while 87 percent of registered Democrats backed Jerry Brown, according to a poll carried out by the Public Policy Institute of California. Among independent leaners, the numbers were almost the same: 76 percent of Republican leaners supported Whitman, while 86 percent of Democratic leaners planned to vote for Brown. Similar patterns appear in the polls from the 2008 presidential election.

Although independent leaners in California are somewhat less likely to describe themselves as strong liberals or conservatives than registered partisans, they are no more likely to say that they’re moderate or middle of the road.

There is also scant evidence that independent voters are more dissatisfied with state government than partisans. Indeed, if anything, independents are more optimistic about California’s future and are more likely to say that the state was going in the right direction. When the Field Poll in 2010 asked whether voters thought that California government “responds to the needs of people like you and your family,” more than one-third of independents said yes – a higher rate of agreement than among either registered Democrats or Republicans.

The reality today is that any candidate or reform effort that builds its campaign around independent voters is unlikely to succeed. The number of true independents – voters who lean toward neither party – is exceptionally small, representing only about 5 percent of the total electorate. According to polls, these voters are also far less interested in politics, pay little attention to political news and campaigns, and are the least likely to actually turn out on Election Day – factors that only further reduce this small group’s influence in elections.

Kogan is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Diego’s Department of Political Science. He is co-author of “Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Governance Failures in San Diego” (Stanford University Press, 2011).